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Qt Framework and Creator – Installing on Linux Mint, Windows 7

I use the Qt Framework to develop portable software for Windows and Linux. You can find my software on sourceforge. This post is going to record the installation instructions for Linux and Windows.

Linux Mint 17

I use Linux Mint 17 at this point and the installation differs slightly from the installation that I found on the net. See below.

Windows 7

Primary development of my software is done on Windows 7 and then the sources are moved to Linux to be compiled there.

Check the rest of this post for installation instructions:

Source Control for the Rest of Us

As you would expect, SourceForge provides Git as a source control solution. I was never able to get my head around Git. All the tutorials seemed to assume too much about what I knew and in spite of my 30 year career in Software Development and many source control tools I’ve used, Git was inscrutable. If you want an intuitive interface to Git that I found easy to use try Git Extensions over on SourceForge. Worked great for me. I can actually check in my source code projects into Git on SourceForge now.

Installing Qt on Linux Mint 17

I found the Qt Framework and Qt Creator in the software manager, but the version was not the latest, so I did a search and found this Forum Thread that talked about installing Qt. However these instructions didn’t work as described. I guess things have changed since they were written.

Start by going to the download page: Here is the OpenSource version which is free for Opens Source projects.

What follows is the original instructions and the changes I needed to do:

The installer does not install any dependencies, so I recommend doing that first.

The instructions indicate that you can use the terminal commands below to install these dependencies, but this does not work for some reason. sudo apt-get install build-essential sudo apt-get install libx11-xcb-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libxrender-dev

Use the Synaptic Package Manager to install the above packages. The above instructions didn’t work. The install just hung trying to reach archive.ubuntu.org.

Put each of the above names into the search box of SPM and then

Mark for Installation.

You can do them individually or all at once.

They pull in additional packages. Confirm to install all of those too.

Do this procedure first, and then Install Qt as follows.

The following commands set the .run file as executable and then runs it as root so it can install Qt framework and creator. To install the .run file, right click for terminal in the directory containing the installer and type:

The forum post says that there is a problem, but I didn’t see that problem:

Let it install with all default settings(update: In Mint 15 with Qt 5.0.2, it’s default installation directory is /home/username/Qt5.0.2. It’s weird to put it there so I’d recommend changing it to /opt/Qt5.0.2)

It defaulted to /opt/Qt for me. Download was very slow. But it worked fine.

Now if you just try to run Qt Creator now you’ll realize you can’t open the application(update: this seems to be fixed with Qt 5.0.2… or Mint 15). That’s because there seems to be some faulty linking problem thing going on. To fix this, you’ll create your own custom launcher.

LM 17 is different but it worked.
to set the logo into the launcher, navigate to the qt5 directory and type “png” you will be able to find the Qt Creator logo. Just drag and drop it to that red rocket, press “ok” and you have your launcher set up.